The food stamp challenge

A Lutheran church in Seattle took the "Food Stamp Challenge," to see what it was like to live on a food stamp budget of $1 per person, per meal for one week. I blogged about one couple, Jason and Krista, at my other blog.

The present food stamp program began during Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s (there was a small brief program 1939-1944) and was expanded during the Carter years, and every administration since, including the Republicans. It is now a massive hot potato that no president or congress dare cut. Food stamps were never intended to replace the family’s food income, but to supplement it so they could have a healthier diet. This is the first fallacy of the “Food Stamp Challenge”--they were supposed to be supplementing a modest food plan.

However, the real motivation behind food stamps is/was to help farmers with surpluses. After WWII, our surpluses (huge expansion during the war) went to Europe to help them rebuild, but eventually they weren’t needed there and they had their own food commodity markets and trade. But our farmers were still raising surpluses. So subsidized food surplus was distributed to prop up agriculture, and to generate additional economic activity. It is supposed to be a type of stimulus for the economy--something Jason and Krista who tried the challenge didn't understand. Like many good intentions, it has created a type of dependency, poor planning, huge bureaucracy and frustration among the poor because it doesn’t do more. Every federal budget, food stamps now called SNAP, is expanded and more people and more programs are added.

According to the Cato Institute, “The largest portion of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s budget consists of food subsidies, not farm subsidies. Food subsidies will cost taxpayers $55 billion in fiscal 2007 and account for 61 percent of the USDA’s budget. The largest food subsidy programs are food stamps; the school breakfast and lunch programs; and the women, infants, and children (WIC) program. The federal government as a whole has about 26 food and nutrition programs operated by six different agencies.“

The biggest distributor of these programs is "faith based and community" initiatives like our church, UALC, which participates in and works at the local food pantry (over 90% funded by the government) and the summer lunch programs (all government).

Update: I didn't know that the USDA also was in the business of providing mortgage money for low income families through a church chipping in the down payment, but it is. Story here about Mennonite Self Help Housing.